Oliver Zöllner

This article, an introduction to the edited volume "Mensch - Maschine" ("Man - Machine"), looks at the relationship between humans and machines from a pop cultural angle. Taking its cue from, and analyzing, Kraftwerk's seminal electropop album "Man - Machine" (1978) from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, the article identifies key topical areas that are inherent in Kraftwerk's work (and not just in the lyrics). These provide critical questions that are relevant for inquiries into the nature of man/machine relationships even today (and even without caring about Kraftwerk or electropop at all).

This monographic study examines general listening patterns with regard to the music/audio streaming service Spotify and in particular the perceived personal autonomy of the platform's users when making listening decisions on the platform. Drawing on theories from media and communication studies, psychology, philosophy and ethics, and employing in-depth interviews as its data-collection method, the study formulates three guiding questions. These relate to the importance of Spotify in the lives of users as well as the awareness of personal autonomy while using the application, and how this is evaluated. It can be concluded that Spotify plays a significant role in the lives of its users. In terms of usage itself, most respondents are aware that Spotify uses algorithms that suggest audio content to them. These are accepted and used by all respondents, which tentatively indicates a limited autonomy of the users. At the same time, users feel like being in a position of control over their decisions and choices, as they feel they can act autonomously by clicking and downloading audio content. Even the problem that Spotify collects vast amounts of user and behavior data and exploits it, inter alia, for advertising purposes, triggers little skepticism among the respondents. All in all, Spotify manages to gain the trust of users with regard to its data handling as well as it creates or reinforces users' confidence in their own perceived autonomy.

This article analyzes how pop music has dealt with visions and impacts of digiti­zation and cybernation, looking at selected key works from the late 1960s throughout the 1990s. Taking its perspective from the sociology of knowledge, it identifies pop music’s trajectory of imaginations in the context of techno­logical change processes. The article concludes that the artistic treatment of these processes remains largely vague and ambiguous, its habitus for the most part dystopian. In fact, rarely did pop music cover digitization and cybernation at all in the period under scrutiny. This relative lack of coverage due to oversight or denial may be attributed to a stance based on nihilistic avoidance unconsciously incorporated in the historical situation.

In the context of digitalization, the analogue vinyl record has gained new popularity in a robust niche market since around the mid-2000s. This book chapter analyzes this commodity object from a critical capitalist perspective and classifies it into four commodity forms of the post-industrial economy. Based on this, the logic of particularity inherent in the vinyl record and related practices of singularization are demonstrated. With a view to changes in technical playback equipment and related changing reception dispositives in dealing with music, the authors conclude that the current vinyl culture reflects a division of society. The culturality of the vinyl record points to specific interweavings with its users, which is expressed in multilayered practices, narratives, and myths. The article concludes by arguing that the vinyl record is a crystallization point for a comprehensive, partly paradoxical social discourse on modernization processes, especially on the metaprocess of digitalization.

This article is an introduction to the concept of disposition (hexis) and what it means and entails in digital contexts. The increasingly digitized world that many people find themselves in needs to be seen in a larger context of five partly overlapping meta-processes of modernization, each of which calls for identifying appropriate virtues: (1) globalization, (2) economization, (3) digitalization, (4) mediatization, and (5) alienation. These processes and their inherent challenges are explained and illustrated with examples ranging from the lives of Marcus Aurelius and Hunter S. Thompson, the popularity of social networking sites, to Alphabet's discontinued collaboration with the Pentagon's Project Maven.

What functions can rituals fulfill in the context of media and specifically in relation to young people? What ethical implications are associated with the issues of "media - rituals - youth"? These questions were the focus of the ninth symposium on media ethics at Stuttgart Media University where three types of "media rituals" emerged: On the one hand, there are rituals mediated by the media, through which societies can reassure themselves of their values. The second is rituality in the act of communication itself, i.e., the meaning-generating reception, production, and interaction of and with media. The third characteristic refers to the rituality evoked by media. Here, the meaning of the depicted actions or events is first generated by the media's staging or structuring.

In this volume, "Brave New World of Communication or the End of Privacy?," communication and media scholars, industry representatives and data protectionists reflect on the urge to present one's self online on social media and other popular media formats, and the ensuing weakened sense of what is private. In the context of empirical findings, aspects of an ethics of privacy as well as concepts of privacy and its economization and possible regulation will be discussed. The focus is on the understanding of privacy that underlies the use of social networks: are there different notions of privacy online and offline? How should individuals and society deal with the challenges of social networking sites? How can users be empowered to engage in self-determined privacy management?

The media are not only an arena for creating and sustaining gender identites and related norms of behavior, they also formulate value judgments and generate notions of masculinity and femininity, i.e., they help define what 'women' and 'men' should be like and what counts as deviation. For young people in particular, role models portrayed in the media are identification material for their own gender identity formation. This volume explores, from a perspective of media ethics, mediated representations of genders, how they are generated, and what the role of justice may be in such contexts.

"Economization" is a major narrative of the present. Related processes of marketization or commodification of many central areas of life can be observed. Whether in politics, in the media, in education, science and culture: efficiency criteria are postulated and often understood as if there were no alternative. The belief in an invisible hand of the market has almost become a dogma: statistics, rankings and evaluations become mediatized lead currencies. People are supposed to behave in such a way that they function better and more smoothly. How can people lead a good life under the conditions of such norms? Which maxims of individual conduct of life are beneficial to society and to sociality? What can a new ethic of values look like in the context of economization?

Digital everyday life brings with it new kinds of challenges. Transparency and anonymity are becoming relevant values for individual identity. Visibility is a fundamental condition for participating in society. But how can people deal with the insecurity that is inherent in self-presentation on the Net when we use personal data to pay for the (apparently) free services of data-hungry companies? Subjects are thus constructed and evaluated only from individual puzzle pieces of their identity, while the remaining parts inevitably remain "invisible." Consequently, can the ideal of empowering people to be masters of their tools only be secured through a pseudonymous appearance on the Internet? But how can communicative action function if the agent remains in the dark?

The digitalized (and rapidly ever more digitizing) present is often characterized by forced transparency and a system of comprehensive data exploitation. From the perspective of child and youth protection, this results in numerous impositions and dangers that minors are usually not yet able to assess. Against this backdrop, digital ethics aims to provide guidance by developing consensual criteria and ethical standards for a successful life online. The concept of "digital citizenship" outlined in the article aims to provide young people with the competence to lead a life with digital applications and their social obligations and demands in a confident manner.

From an ethical and sociological perspective this article analyzes what it means when users upload pictures of children on social media forums. The paper argues that, under the conditions of Big Data and related surveillance practices, and following up on categories introduced by Hannah Arendt in "The Human Condition" (1958), what was once private has become part of the public sphere: people would increasingly become "publicly private," and act accordingly. The categorical blurring of what can be shown publicly and what should remain hidden in the private realm, and the consequences this has for digital practices such as exposing children by way of online pictures, may be a consequence of a new "relational", hive-orientated understanding of the self in online contexts which is a departure from a classically individual, autonomous understanding of the individual self. This poses an ethical problem inherent in many other practices of digitality as well.

How WhatsApp Rules the Everyday: An Empirical Study on the Ambivalent Use of Messenger Services. Based on qualitative interview fieldwork, this study analyzes the partly paradoxical perception of WhatsApp as a technology that both facilitates and complicates the everyday life of people, and that is seen as an instrument that allows for dominating others as well as being dominated by others. The widely used messenger service thus can make people happy as well as unhappy, depending on context, situation and degree of reflection. The authors use the collected interview data to develop a heuristic model that is suitable for initiating further research and reflection on the role of digital media in everyday life.

Our thinking about existence in the space between man and machine has basically only just begun. But what was science fiction just a few years ago has long since entered our everyday lives: Care robots, war robots, sex robots, and similar entities. Will machines develop into ethical actors with consciousness in the future? Will they be able to morally guide their own behavior? This also touches on broader questions of responsibility: Who will make decisions in the future? There have long been dystopian visions of a threat to the world from vastly superior artificial intelligences as well as utopian hopes for a new digital world in which the human spirit makes itself immortal. In this volume, ethicists, literary scholars, sociologists, and futurists set out in search of relevant questions and conceivable answers. It is about the human-machine relationship, possibilities of acting wisely in the machine age, autonomous and connected driving and its dilemmas, and work and working in the future. At the end, there is a plea for a new way of thinking about education in the digital age.

Digitalization has set in motion social processes that are having an impact on our democratic fabric. These include phenomena that affect the media system itself, such as a weakening of quality journalism, a strengthening of disinformation and populist media, and an increasing power of opinion of intermediaries (such as Google, Meta, et al.). As a result, processes can be observed that directly affect our understanding of democracy: these are, in particular, tendencies that lead to the destabilization of democratic opinion- and will-forming and thus call democratic negotiation and decision-making processes into question. Surveillance technologies that encroach on our fundamental values of privacy and autonomy can be just as dangerous to democracy. The authors reflect from ethical, media studies, philosophical and legal perspectives on the significance of current developments for our democracy in a digital world, and what normative requirements and options for action exist.

This article analyzes why "fake news" and conspiracy narratives -- henceforth, "sticky falsehood" -- have been able to embed themselves so prominently in our digital everyday life. To this end, the essay traces the concepts of truth that have increasingly faltered in modernity as well as the normative consequences of this development and classifies them from media-historical, communication-sociological, and philosophical perspectives. The article's central thesis is that disinformation, lies, and "fake news" are expressions of a nihilistic attitude in society. In seven analytical steps, the author sets out various aspects of a "crisis of truth," focusing in particular on conspiracy theories, right-wing populist media offerings, so-called postmodernism, and constructs of the not-true. He details the extent to which shocks to the presuppositions of knowledge and a nihilism of "kitsch" -- the "sticky" falsehood that seems so attractive -- are observable. At the end, the article also outlines possible solutions for dealing with disinformation and truth crises.

Using the example of physical sound carriers (vinyl records and compact discs) and streaming services (Spotify et al.), this article analyzes how these refer to different relations of proximity, work, and world. While vinyl records and CDs as physical materials are still close to their users and the situation in which they are used, streaming services, which appear to be largely dematerialized, replace this proximity with a retrieval of files from further away. While records and CDs capture a work in a certain way and, as classic storage media, offer a material frame for it, streaming largely dissolves this work character and offers relatively fluid playlists instead. The consumption of resources (oil, electricity, etc.), which is inherent to all three media formats under consideration, is more or less a blind spot for music recipients, or is largely negated in a nihilistic habitus of technology appropriation. Completely out of sight is the fundamental transformation of things such as sound carriers or music systems from objects to be used to systems that "use" people, as Martin Heidegger (1949) put it in his approach to the philosophy of technology. This happens by exploiting the human being as a resource in the digital realm and turning him/her into a servant of the technical system, for example by permanently logging and storing his/her data in streaming and evaluating it for commercial purposes. If, on the other hand, vinyl records are seen by their users as a resistant media format, this attitude is also nihilistic, because it negates the considerable consumption of resources by this media format as well as the dialectical fact that -- in the context of its form as a collectible and investment item -- it has long since reached out to digital platforms for identifying and realizing its value as well as for buying and selling, and is increasingly dependent on them.